Seems I've been delinquent on this blog for two and a half years. I'm still here! I've been busy with work and life, but I'm keeping up with old time music throughout. I'm playing more fiddle than banjo these days, but I still love playing banjo with a good fiddler whenever I can. I've had a couple of good opportunities lately. A couple weeks ago Hen's Teeth came through town and invited me to play banjo with them for the Every Wednesday Square Dance. So of course I did and that was a blast. After the dance we went over to the Northwest Portland Hostel, where they were staying, to grab some dinner and then we proceeded to play tunes for a couple more hours. This week I went back to the Every Wednesday Square Dance where Gabrielle Macrae and Barry Southern were playing and they asked me to sit in on banjo so Barry could play bass. (Barry is waaaayyyyy better than me on banjo, but I don't play bass.) So I did, and of course that was a blast. So life is pretty good on banjo lately.

But what I really came to post about is that we've started a new public old time music jam down at the afore-mentioned Northwest Portland Hostel every week on Thursday from 7-10pm. We're two weeks in and have had a good turn-out so far. We spent the first week in A and the second week in D, so we'll probably play G tunes next week. :-) The Hostel Cafe cafe has great food with several micro-brews and Kombucha on tap, so it's a pretty great setting for a jam. If you're in Portland or just passing through, come on out!

Cheers, Scott

p.s. I'll be up at Oly Old Time next weekend, so if you see me there, let's play some tunes. :-)

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I learned the basics of clawhammer back in college in Sacramento, California, in the early eighties. But I didn't go very far with it at that time and eventually put my banjo aside for many years. I got interested again through the old time music revival going on here in Portland, Oregon, and started playing in earnest in the spring of 2004. I primarily used Perlman's, Leftwich's, and Krassen's books to learn, but also attended American Banjo Camp three times and the Dusty Strings Clawhammer Banjo Workshop twice. It was very cool to learn directly from some of the well known players in both cases. In 2006 I started attending festivals and getting out to jams. Then I played with local stringband Ebenezer for a couple of years, from 2007-2009. I started learning old time fiddle four years ago.